Just a note to confirm that this pet (gtkpod 1.0.0 for iPod-Touch & iPhone) works with my iPod Shuffle (3rd gen). Didn't have to install any extra lib files for Lucid Pup 5.10. Had to fiddle around some with the settings in gtkpod, but it's functional, not efficacious, let's say.

Haven't tried out the mp3 gain pet linked further down in this thread, but I usually normalize my mp3 files in dbpoweramp (more options), I know, in Windoze, but I bought J River Media Center some time ago and I've kind of become attached to it. Media Center has more tricks up its sleeve than iTunes and Songbird put together. If only MediaMonkey would monkey over with a Linux port, I'd give it not one but five bananas.

By the way, Songbird has been sold for 11 million bucks to Philips Electronics, so I've heard. Hope the founders of the program made some money for all their hard work and creativity. Songbird has also, as expected, given up all support for iPods. The iPod plugin is gone. I'm uninstalling Songbird from my Lucid Pup. It's a memory hog anyway. My iPod sounds great on my cheap computer speakers with gtkpod and Pmusic. To sound so good, Apple must have bought the sound chip for the iPod from the company that used to make Aardvark sound cards for the PC. Or maybe it's my Soundblaster-compatible card, which Puppy found without a hiccup. Who knows.

First time posting, so pardon me for rambling. Kudos to Barry and all the contributors for an outstanding pup. Lucid Puppy respected and let me load the driver for my defunct (circa 1998) ATI Rage 128 Pro 16M AGP video card on my antique 800Mhz PIII with 512 RAM, and so it goes, goodness all the way!

Got my iPod Shuffle working with Amarok in Lucid Pup 5.10 late last night.

The steps I took to achieve this feat as a novice are as follows:

A. Installed the pet named in this thread, viz., "gtkpod 1.0.0 for iPod-Touch & iPhone" by tempetuous. Then made sure my iPod was recognized by gtkpod. Browsed to: http://www.wikihow.com/Check-Your-iPod%27s-Generation to double-check the model and generation of my matchbox-size, screen-less (AlbumArt not supported) iPod.

B. Downloaded and installed the SFS file entitled "amarok-1.4-lucid.sfs for Pupppy 5.1" by dejan555 I believe, from http://puppylinux.org/wikka/LucidPuppySFS?show_comments=1 Pointed the device location in Amarok to the mount point where my iPod appeared on the desktop when plugged in. I have a frugal install of Lucid Pup 5.10, with a removable 500GB USB hard drive (NTFS) plugged in alongside my iPod at the back of my PIII machine's two USB ports, USB <2.0, I imagine.
Issue #1: Had to select the device mount point in Amarok as /mnt/sdc. Don't know why. When pointed to /mnt/ipod, Amarok didn't list any files, even though the latter directory was created by gtkpod I assume as a place for music file backups from the iPod. Some clarification would be helpful here.

C. Right-clicked on an album name in Amarok to load the mp3 files. Clicked the blue arrow button to play. Music.

Conclusion: The iPod's mp3 files play fine, with great clarity and superb stereo imaging, and with all the tag information intact and showing correctly in Amarok.
Issue #2: I don't have any protected files on the iPod, but the few m4a files that I do have don't play in Amarok. "No demuxer found..." is the error message. Wonder if the eminently knowledgeable tempetuous would care to comment on why they don't play. TIA.

Postscript: Hope this account helps someone, who can or cannot live without his/her iPod. I normally listen to music on my computer off my music database stored on my removable hard drive. But it's useful to have an alternative to iTunes for loading and unloading songs from the portable music player, which, to be fair, sounds great, even when listened to, on the move, with earpads (good) or earbuds (better). I think it's the sound quality of the iPod, more than its appearance or fashionable status-symbol-value, that has made it such a successful and profitable product for Apple Computer Corp.

Addendum: Similar in functionality to Rhythmbox, Amarok apparently means "wolf" in Inuktitut. Wolves don't sing, they howl. There was a DJ called "Howling Wolf" I heard mention of many years ago. Anyway, wolves do have pups, so there. Bye, bye, Songbird. Hello Lupus, Amarok.

the few m4a files that I do have don't play in Amarok. "No demuxer found..." is the error message. Wonder if the eminently knowledgeable tempetuous would care to comment on why they don't play.

That's really a question for the contributor of the Amarok package you're referring to.

If the developer of that package compiled the application from source, then they would know for sure which options were enabled during configuration.
But a certain number of applications contributed on this forum have been re-packaged from other distributions, especially Debian/Ubuntu, now that Puppy 5.x is library-compatible with Ubuntu (10.04 Lucid Lynx).
In these cases it can be difficult knowing the exact configuration details of the application.

If this Amarok package uses the Xine backend framework (instead of the gstreamer backend) then m4a (AAC) support will depend on whether the appropriate Xine input plugin has been enabled in the configuration, and included in the package. Specifically I'm referring to xineplug_decode_faad.so
which should be located at /usr/lib/xine/plugins/<xine-version>/

EDIT: yes, xineplug_decode_faad.so is present, and works. See next post.Last edited by tempestuous on Wed 15 Sep 2010, 05:44; edited 1 time in total

Well I just installed dejan555's amarok-1.4-lucid.sfs in Puppy 5.1 now, and m4a audio files play fine!
Then I configured gtkpod to use amarok for "Play now" ("amarok %s") and this also successfully launched m4a files in amarok.
The only problem I anticipate is if the m4a file is DRM-protected!

If the file originates from Apple, and is protected, it'll probably have the .m4p extension, anyway. So, unless someone's renaming the extension...

It'd be nice if the players and various media-information tools could look at a file and tell whether it's DRM-protected right away, rather than just go ahead and blindly try to parse/play the file, anyway. (Yeah, wishful thinking. Especially since there's multiple types of DRM encoding, and aside from Apple's use of .m4p, there really isn't an easy way to tell. )_________________[ Puppy 4.3.1 JP, Frugal install | 1GB RAM | 1.3GB swap ] * My Pidgin Builds for Puppy 4.3.1+
In memory of our beloved American Eskimo puppy (1995-2010) and black Lab puppy (1997-2011).

Thanks for the compatibility report, tempestuous, I'll test out my m4a files more thoroughly in Amarok than I have, because I hardly ever use them. The protected m4p files I had on the iPod, I've either converted them to mp3 format using Sound Taxi, for personal use, or just scrapped them. Flac and Ape formats are better containers if you're ripping music off your CDs, using EAC, which on the PC side IMHO is really the best audio ripper--I was tempted to says "hands down" but I won't, because some moronic poster used this expression five times in one comment on another forum. How 'bout "hands up" instead of "hands down"? But let's not quibble.

It would be great, if it were possible, to have all the audio codecs in one pet, a la the great K-Lite Codec Pack for PCs. If I had more programming skills, other than a cursory knowledge of javascript, I might have attempted this job myself as a contribution. But for now, I think I'll just convert the m4a's to mp3 format, for it will, at least, save me from mucking up my meticulously tagged songs.

Tip: Do not add your AlbumArt to your mp3s. It will bloat their file size, and as a result you'll have less music on your iPod. Try and keep the AlbumArt pics separately, even if you have an IPod with a screen. As my puny shuffle doesn't have a screen, I place a "folder.jpg" picture file in each album directory. And then I can see the Album Cover when I play my tunes on my Desktop PC. I used to even see the pictures, if I remember correctly, in Aqualung, in Puppy 4.31, which I thought and still think is a masterpiece. Puppy 4.3x might probably never be outdone, alas. Lucid Pup is a dog of a different breed. Not a Border Collie, the most intelligent dog in the world, but maybe a Caniche (Poodle)--the third most intelligent. Who's to say. Bow wow. And thanks all.

It would be great, if it were possible, to have all the audio codecs in one pet, a la the great K-Lite Codec Pack for PCs.

This approach is not applicable in Linux. Linux audio applications cannot, generally, access a common registry of codecs as happens in Windows.
Linux applications must be explicitly configured to support the various audio codecs, and sometimes they link to external libraries for this purpose. But any developer who knows their subject can easily do so. It's not rocket science, and the range of audio codecs out there is really quite manageable, and hasn't changed in years.
Case in point; see my XMMS package here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=26528
All worthwhile audio codecs are properly enabled. Period.
(XMMS requires the GTK1 libraries in Puppy versions 4.x and 5.x)
The ffmpeg libary is an all-in-one codec pool in Linux, but pmusic is the only application I know of which will use this library.

winderix wrote:

for now, I think I'll just convert the m4a's to mp3 format, for it will, at least, save me from mucking up my meticulously tagged songs.

m4a (or m4p)-to-mp3 conversion involves significant quality loss.
You would be better off converting your DRM'd audio files to flac. flac supports tags.
Or if small file size is important to you, try to get a copy of QTFairUse6, which will strip off the DRM without re-encoding the AAC audio data.

winderix wrote:

Flac and Ape formats are better containers if you're ripping music off your CDs

Let's be clear on this subject; file containers do not determine audio quality. It's the codec which matters, and the best compression is no compression! Yes, FLAC and Monkeys Audio are better audio codecs (for quality, not size) than AAC, because they're lossless codecs. The containers they're written within just happen to be flac and ape, respectively. The FLAC codec can also be written within the ogg file container.

4th-generation iPod-Touch and iPhones run Apple iOS 4.x, and these devices have limited support in gtkpod-1.0.0.
Apparently you can connect OK, even copy music files, but the music-sync function doesn't work.
The developers are working on it. It appears that 4th-gen support is fixed with the latest libimobiledevice library, but usbmuxd and libgpod also need to be updated.

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